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On the day when transit Mars, at 29°54 Scorpio, completes its two day transit of the most karmic degree of the zodiac (this happens once every two years), in a burst of divine synchronicity, I just spent the better part of three hours with my Minneapolis cousin Ben Kreilkamp, who had stopped by on his way north to hear a karmic tale.

Ben wanted to tape the story of my third marriage — a story I had told him during a wine-fueled dinner in Minneapolis, after we had kayaked lakes all afternoon, last September. Today he told me that he had known about my first, second and fourth marriages, but had had no idea about this other marriage, to a dark figure, now deceased, with a PTSD military history, a hidden alcohol addiction, and an appropriate name: “Phil Lowman.”

Ben is a playwright, but wonders if he might turn this story into a screenplay.

The story of that year-long voyage into hell when I was 39 years old is, as you can imagine, intense and dramatic, an outpicturing of my own then buried shadow, and itself foreshadowed via an archetypal dream of a numinous wolf with yellow eyes, guarding the big iron gate to “home.” In order to go through the gate I had to stare the wolf down. Little did I know at the time, but when the dream finally materialized, years later, “home” would be signaled in the middle of the night, via the figure of Phil: For the first time he allowed me to see him him drunk, the iris of his eyes had morphed to yellow, and for several hours I had to stare him down, finally take and hold my own power — come home to myself — or die.

Odd then, that afterwards, in a second burst of synchronicity, I should discover that Pat Conroy has just died, he whose thinly veiled tales of his own dramatic karmic Southern family life, left me so often, sunk into astonished tears.

Pat Conroy, who wove his family strife into novels of Carolina, dies at 70